The remarkable thing about language change is that it only started happening when I started noticing it. For centuries, English was constant and true, but as soon as I was old enough to have an appreciation of good standards of usage, people around me started falling short. Since then, there has been an alarming, unprecedented surge in rule-breaking.

Neither I nor anyone else really believes any such thing, of course, but some of us sometimes talk as if we do. One such person is Lionel Shriver.

In an article in Harper’s, she wages war on what she calls “semantic drift”. Using the rhetorical style that’s obligatory for such pieces – mock-theatrical (and therefore deniable) moral horror – she rails against “decay”, “degeneration”, “blight”, “barbarism”, “mob rule” and the replacement of “civilised” with “contaminated” English at the hands of “animals”. Shriver’s a fantastic writer, but this kind of thing is just tiring.

The substance of this linguistic apocalypse is, as she sees it, the ignorant modern misuse of words such as literally, nonplussed, notorious, performative and enervated, and the blurring of distinctions such as less/fewer, as/like, who/whom and that/which.

On some of these, I think she has a point. While it’s unlikely anyone will be genuinely confused by “My head literally exploded”, the near-opposite meanings that nonplussed now has make it hard to use reliably. And it’s handy, even if only for formal occasions, to know how to whom. The that/which distinction, on the other hand, is needless. Most Brits (and a good many Americans) are indifferent to it, with no ill effects.